The moment the relic activated, Eric closed his eyes and braced for something, though he had no real idea what.
What came instead was the floor disappearing entirely beneath him.
It was not metaphorically in any way. He felt it, genuinely, the exact sickening lurch of missing a step in the dark, of reaching for solid ground and finding only empty air where his foot expected purchase. His stomach dropped the way it did in the half-second before a rollercoaster's first real plunge, that instant where your body understands you're falling before your mind has fully caught up to agree.
He didn't panic. He let himself fall.
The darkness around him stretched on for what felt like far longer than it probably was, and then, gradually, it began to thin, not brightening exactly, just losing its total, suffocating weight, replaced slowly by a whitish-grey fog pressing in from every direction. It was thick enough that when Eric lifted his own hand in front of his face, he couldn't make out so much as an outline of his fingers.
And then the feelings hit.
Eric felt anger first, sharp and sudden, gone before he could even properly register its source. Then sadness, heavy and formless. Guilt, close behind it, familiar in a way that made his chest tighten. Anticipation. Nostalgia, warm and aching. Happiness, joy, something close to ecstasy, and then, underneath all of it, a thread of pure, wordless fear.
They didn't arrive one at a time. They crashed into him all together, overlapping, indistinguishable from each other, a flood of sensation with no clear edges anywhere.
Eric didn't fight it. He simply let it wash through him rather than trying to sort any of it into order. He understood, somehow, without being told, that he might never feel anything quite like this again. Not this raw. Not this unfiltered.
Slowly, the fog began to lift.
As it thinned, the storm of emotion inside him thinned along with it, the anger fading first, bleeding away into something quieter. Somewhere in the grey distance, a point of red light flickered into being; it was small at first before becoming steadier, a glowing orb hanging far off toward the northeast.
Before Eric could fully process it, another orb bloomed to life toward the northwest, blue this time. Then green. Orange. Purple. White. Black. A deep, near-black shade of forest green after that, and more still, scattered across the vanishing fog in every direction he looked.
The more of them appeared, the faster the fog dissolved around him, and the deeper, richer, more saturated each orb's color became, as though the mist itself had been diluting them the entire time.
Finally, after what felt like an unmeasured stretch of time, the last of the fog cleared completely.
What lay in front of him took his breath away.
A vast expanse of pink earth stretched out in every direction, endless and glowing faintly under a sky that held, impossibly, a burning purple sun. Pale clouds, white and grey, drifted slowly and lazily across it, and the light pouring down from that strange sun bathed the entire land in something warm and luminous, almost gentle. Standing there, beneath it, Eric felt something settle in his chest, a calm so complete it felt almost unnatural, like every weight he'd ever carried had simply been set down somewhere behind him.
"Max," he murmured, glancing around instinctively, though he wasn't entirely sure why the name had surfaced first.
The pink soil stretched endlessly in every direction, broken here and there by low, gentle mounds rising from the earth. Thin streams wound freely across the landscape, gold at their source but darkening steadily as they moved, black water bleeding into them the further they traveled from wherever they began.
It was beautiful, undeniably. But the longer Eric looked at it, really looked, the more something else crept in beneath the beauty. A quiet, persistent unease. Something depressive sitting just under the surface of all that gentle color, some unresolved confusion humming faintly through the entire landscape like a held breath that never quite released.
The silence pressed in around him, total and absolute. He had the distinct sense that if he dropped something small right now, even a single pin, the sound would carry across the entire land, echoing without end.
Eric glanced around and found no living beings here, which was exactly what he expected. Living forms could not take shape inside a domain of emotions at the Lysi Nova rank or below unless their owner was highly aware of their own feelings and emotionally strong enough to sustain them. These forms mirrored the emotional state of the person they belonged to, shifting constantly as those emotions shifted, so change here was the norm rather than the exception. Only after advancing to Hypernova would living forms begin to appear on their own, their number varying from person to person. If Eric had sensed any creatures moving through this space, he would have been far more on guard than he was now.
Danger existed everywhere in this world, and a domain of emotions was no exception, even when the domain belonged to oneself. Whenever someone sent their consciousness inside using any method available to them, that act carved a small hole into the inner realm to let the consciousness through. Aside from Emotion Pathway Aura users, no one could observe the state or changes within a domain of emotions without physically entering it that way.
Normal Walkers can observe, store charms or other resources, and give their Emotional Spirit commands to get a Technique ready. However, aside from Emotion Pathway Aura users, no one could observe the state or changes within a domain of emotions without physically entering it that way. But every hole came with a cost. Once opened, it let the Aura of emotions leak outward, and that leak was enough to draw the attention of emotion devourers.
Emotion devourers were pathway beasts native to the Emotion Pathway, much like the divine puppets Eric had encountered while rescuing the kidnapped children, which belonged to the Overseeing Pathway instead. Pathway beasts as a whole came in countless types and forms, fed on entirely different things depending on their nature, and required different methods to kill, capture, or enslave. Emotion devourers followed that same variety, appearing in every shape and size imaginable. The moment one sensed the Aura leaking from an open domain, it would try to slip inside and feast on the emotions stored there. A single devourer that made it in gained an essentially endless food source, and as long as it stayed low and avoided drawing attention without needing any specialized method to do so, it could remain hidden indefinitely.
Their method of reproduction was strange in its own right. Emotion devourers had no gender at all, and lacked any stomach or digestive system, converting the emotions they consumed directly into nutrition for their bodies. Once a devourer had eaten enough, it reached a point of fullness, though it could continue eating past that point if it chose. Anything consumed beyond that threshold accumulated as surplus nutrients, and if that surplus kept growing, it eventually formed a baby that emerged from the parent's body as a new, independent devourer. The offspring generally resembled its parent, though rarely as an exact match, and its personality, along with its likes and dislikes, formed based on the average makeup of the emotions it had been created from.
It was a vast subject, but Eric had always made a habit of learning at least the basics of everything he came across. A baby born from pure anger tended to be aggressive by nature, growling and lashing out at anything nearby, which left it poorly suited to hiding or planning ahead and often led to an early death through needless conflict. One born from greed turned out crafty and envious instead, prone to scheming against its own kin just to steal their food. A baby shaped by sadness and guilt cried often and struggled to interact with others, but it excelled at staying hidden, and its capacity for empathy meant it could still find help from others when it needed food, giving it better odds of survival than its more aggressive kin. These were only the extreme cases, of course. In practice, countless combinations existed between them. When a devourer prepared to produce offspring, it paid close attention to the emotions it consumed, their intensity, and their proportions, trying deliberately to shape a well-rounded baby rather than leaving the outcome to chance.
Emotion Pathway Aura users could control exactly how much Aura leaked out when they opened their domain, which let them lure in and capture large numbers of emotion devourers at will. From there, they could study them, raise them, breed new combinations, and eventually sell them, since a substantial market existed for buying and selling pathway beasts as prized forging materials. A domain of emotions belonging to an Aura user made for the ideal place to raise them, given the user's command over the domain's state, their accumulated knowledge, their resources, their methods, their Aura, and the domain's own unique properties. Every one of those factors worked in their favor.
Despite their unusual biology, emotion devourers had grown more intelligent than the average pathway beast, the product of countless millennia spent evolving new ways to infiltrate domains undetected. They were naturally cunning, skilled at hiding, and adept at slipping through any opening they could find, though without some special ability of their own, none could enter a domain that hadn't already been breached. Even so, their intelligence still fell well short of that possessed by angel spirits. The difference was obvious enough on its own. Angel spirits could speak, reason, and plan as fully conscious beings, while emotion devourers remained limited to the narrow set of behaviors that had kept their kind alive for so long.
As a rule, Aura users only attracted emotion devourers a full rank below their own. In Eric's case, that meant the strongest devourers he was likely to draw in would sit at Auri Nova or Nova level at most. Attracting a devourer of the same rank as the user required an unusually vast reserve of strong, stable emotion, and pulling in one from a rank higher still was rare enough that history had recorded only a handful of cases.
Eric looked around but didn't see a single soul there. Still, he didn't rest. He reached into his pocket and drew out the round earring, a relic that had naturally traveled with him into the domain of emotions and could serve him well here.
Had it not been for this relic, he wouldn't have risked coming in at all.
He activated it, the same way he'd primed his consciousness before entering. A dazzling black light scattered with white stars swept across the sky and spread into every corner of the domain.
A few seconds later, the light folded back in on itself and returned to the relic. Had any intruder been hiding nearby, the light would have caught it and dragged it back to him.
Of course, some emotion devourer skilled enough at hiding, or ranked higher than the relic itself, might have slipped past it. The relic was only Rank 4, Auri Nova at best. But Eric doubted it. He was under its protection, and something that strong sneaking past should have set off some kind of warning.
He couldn't be that unlucky. Could he?
A single pale bubble drifted up from the soil near his feet, tinged faintly with uncertainty, and popped soundlessly in the air.
He checked a while longer before finally letting it go. If there really was an intruder he couldn't find, he could only chalk it up to bad luck and the limits of his own methods.
He looked down at the relic in his palm, something like fondness settling into his expression. A warm gold bubble rose lazily from the ground beside him. "If not for this, I'd already be in serious trouble. Edward lent it to me for only three hundred contribution points. That alone tells me how sincere he was about helping."
Edward's knowledge of the domain of emotions had come as a bonus on top of the relic itself, and it was proving its worth now too.
As the thought settled, Eric noticed something stir behind him. From a patch of soil nearby, a small pink orb threaded with red patches pushed itself free and floated up into the sky, drifting there on its own.
He let out a slow breath and started walking.
His goal was simple. Find his emotional Spirit.
Eric didn't need to search for long. The domain might be vast, but he could sense exactly where his emotional persona resided, the pull toward it as clear as a compass needle finding north.
Before long, he arrived at the edge of a lake. The water lay still and clear as a mirror, perfectly reflecting the hills that ringed its shore.
By the water's edge stood a small, tattered hut. Its roof was thatched from yellowed branches, the leaves and grass woven between them, worn through with holes. Cracks ran along the walls, and the whole structure gave off a feeling that Eric couldn't quite put into words, something between abandonment and memory.
He stood there a moment, just looking at it. A colorful orb rose first, swirling with too many feelings at once to separate, followed by a soft blue one that drifted up beside it, slower and heavier.
"This is the hut Max and I stayed in," he murmured, "after we killed the person who saved us."
He shook his head, pushing the memory back down before it could pull him any further, and made himself move.
He walked down the hill and reached the hut a few minutes later. Signs of recent life were scattered around it. A fireplace with old ash still packed into its base. A few dirty plates left stacked near the entrance. A cooking pot that looked as though it had been used within the hour.
Just as he stepped forward to enter, footsteps sounded behind him.
Eric turned sharply and froze.
He shouldn't have been so caught off guard by the sight of his own emotional persona, and yet he was. The figure looked exactly like him, unsurprising in itself, dressed in simple, slightly worn clothes. But the hair was wrong. The eyes were wrong. Where Eric's were pink, this version's were stark white.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. They simply stared, both frozen in matching shock.
The Spirit had been holding a bundle of yellow sticks, kindling by the look of it, and they clattered to the ground as both hands flew up to cover his mouth, his breath catching audibly.
"Oh! Finally, my main body has shown up." His voice came out light, almost delighted, edged with something like relief. "I was wondering when you'd come here."
Eric's brows drew together. "What do you mean?"
The Spirit didn't answer. Instead, he darted past Eric and into the hut, emerging a moment later with two low bamboo seats. He set them down near the water and dropped onto the one closer to the lake, gesturing for Eric to take the other.
Eric didn't sit right away. He raised the Emotion Pathway relic first and turned it toward the Spirit, checking him carefully before he trusted anything else.
Nothing came back wrong. This was the real thing, no imitation, no trick. Still, Eric's suspicion had only deepened watching the Spirit act this way, and it took him a moment to work through why.
Emotional personas were manifestations of a person's deepest, truest emotions, formed the instant an Aura user awakened and their domain of emotions first took shape. They existed as something singular, a blend of a person's core feelings fused with the universal power that gave the domain its form. They lived out their entire existence inside that domain, doing nothing but presiding over it, growing stronger as the user's rank rose, and stronger still if the user happened to walk the Emotion Pathway itself.
Eric had expected his persona to mirror him completely, not just in appearance but in temperament. Instead, the personality in front of him felt almost like a stranger's.
That alone was enough to keep his guard up. He would have verified the persona regardless of how it behaved, but its strangeness had only sharpened the instinct.
The suspicion took shape as a dark brown orb, dense and slow, drifting up from somewhere near his feet.
The persona blinked at him, once, twice, and then his eyes went wide with something between delight and awe. "As expected of my main body. You really are a vigilant person." He shot Eric an enthusiastic thumbs-up, grinning as he'd just confirmed something he'd always suspected.
"So this is what's underneath it all, huh?" He tilted his head, seemingly talking half to himself. "A man-child who wears his feelings on his sleeve. I think I picked up a lot of that from Max, honestly."
A small, sheepish orb the color of pale amber bubbled up beside him as he said it, there and gone before Eric could think too hard about it.
Eric finally sat, lowering himself onto the bamboo seat across from his persona, the one set slightly closer to the hut.
"Do you want to eat something?" the spirit asked, already glancing apologetically toward the empty pot by the fire. "Sorry, I just finished the last of it. There's nothing left."
"What is there even to eat out here?" Eric studied the barren horizon beyond the lake. "This place doesn't look like it has a single animal in it."
"I made a field," the spirit said, brightening at the chance to explain. "Out near the edge of the domain, past those hills. Found some corn seeds a while back and started farming them properly. It takes up most of my time these days." He gestured vaguely at the hut behind him, a small orb of quiet pride rising with the motion. "Lucky I found this place too. Gives me somewhere to actually sleep, even if there's no real night here. Purple sun just sits there all day."
He kept talking, unprompted, words tumbling out easily. "I'd been out for a few days gathering sticks and grass to patch the roof, and when I got back, you were just standing there." His hands flew up again, mimicking the shock from earlier. "Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting to see my main body's consciousness? Years. I don't even know how many. You have no idea how shocked I was!"
He said all of it freely, nothing held back, nothing guarded, the openness of someone who'd simply never learned to be anything other than honest. He answered questions Eric hadn't even asked yet, filling every silence before it had the chance to stretch. An emotional Spirit could lie under ordinary circumstances, Eric knew, to anyone else in existence. But never to its main body. Not once, not ever.
Once Eric had a working sense of how the spirit lived, what filled its days, he decided it was time to move past the pleasantries. Time wasn't something he had in abundance here.
But before he could speak, his gaze drifted, almost on its own, toward the surface of the lake.
The bamboo seat sat there, perfectly reflected in the still water. The Emotional Spirit did not.
The spirit followed Eric's gaze down to the lake's surface, then looked back up at him and smiled, easy and unbothered. "If you're curious, go ahead and try to see your own reflection. It's nothing special."
Eric studied that open, guileless face for a moment. He genuinely doesn't know anything about my situation out there, he thought. Why else would he suggest I look, when he has no idea I can't?
He stood and walked to the lake's edge, crouching down, looking into the water with something close to anticipation.
Nothing.
His own image flickered into view for barely a second before blurring at the edges and dissolving entirely, leaving only the reflection of sky and hills behind.
He felt nothing looking at it. No orb rose. Just a flat, quiet absence where a reaction should have been.
Eric let out a slow breath and straightened up.
"I named it the Lake of True Self," the spirit called out behind him, a note of wistfulness creeping into his voice. "Reflects a person's true nature, supposedly. Though honestly, that's just a name I liked the sound of. I never had anyone else to test it on, and I obviously can't see myself in it." He shrugged, a small, resigned orb the color of faded grey drifting up from beside his seat. "For all I actually know, it's just a normal lake."
Eric nodded slowly and turned back to face him. "Do you know anything about what's happening outside of here?"
The spirit shook his head, his expression turning apologetic. "No, nothing. I can't see or sense anything past this domain." He tapped a finger against his own chest. "All I can really do is guess at the main body's current emotional state, based on what kind of feelings show up here, and how many of them there are."
Be it the emotional Spirit of an Aura user walking the Emotion Pathway or of the Mind Pathway, each one gained, upon formation, a share of knowledge from the universal power regarding the domain of emotions. Basic methods came with it. How to read the user's emotional state through the emotions produced here. How to manage the domain and endure within it. And scattered, incomplete fragments of memory belonging to their main body.
The only real difference was that a spirit born of the Emotion Pathway received far more of that knowledge, grew stronger for it, and could govern a much wider territory of the domain, with far greater ease than any other kind.
Eric lowered himself back into his seat. He studied the spirit's face across from him, his own gaze cold and searching, meeting a gaze that looked back at him with nothing but tenderness.
Without a trace of hesitation, the spirit asked, "How is Max?"
"He's been good."
The spirit simply nodded, as if that was all he needed.
Eric let the silence sit for a moment before speaking again. "I'll get straight to it. There's a question that's been sitting with me for a while now. Something about how to raise the rate at which I control my Aura." He paused. "Do you understand what I mean?"
Something like pity flickered through the spirit's eyes as he looked at Eric. He let out a long, slow breath and lifted his gaze to the pale white sky above them.
A small green moon hung there, corroding.
It had once been full of cracks, cracks that were healing, closing themselves slowly over time. But now those same cracks had turned to corrosion instead. The moon had shrunk smaller still, so faint now that only careful attention would catch it hanging there at all.
But this was the spirit. The manifestation of this place, holding the highest authority within it. Nothing could stay hidden from him here. Not even this.
This was the question Eric had carried with him for a long time, the one he had finally decided to face. He needed to grow faster than he currently could, and that need alone was worth the risk of coming here, of asking his own spirit to look inward and tell him, honestly, what he felt for his wife.
Had he and Ruby only shared a short time, the spirit might not have been able to answer at all. But it had been years now. Years were enough.
The spirit didn't need to deduce anything. He already knew the answer, had known it for some time. What he felt, instead, was reluctance.
But a spirit could not lie to its main body. Not once, not ever.
He looked at Eric quietly, and a gentle, almost sorrowful smile settled over his face.
He shook his head. "No."
For the briefest moment, something flickered across Eric's eyes. Disappointment, quiet and unguarded, there and gone before it could fully form into anything else.
Above them, the small green moon corroded further. The cracks that had been slowly healing tore open wider, faster, until dust began sifting down from its surface in a fine, silent rain. Then the moon crumbled entirely, breaking apart into nothing.
A faint tremor passed through the ground beneath them, rattling everything in the domain for a moment. Neither of them moved. Neither of them panicked.
The tremor passed as quietly as it came.
Eric took a deep breath, only now noticing how many dark brown orbs had gathered in the sky above him, dense and clustered. He didn't care about them. Not now.
He had his answer. Staying any longer would serve no purpose.
He said his goodbyes to the spirit and rose from his seat. The question that had followed him for so long finally had a shape to it, an answer he could carry forward. He could move ahead now, make the decisions waiting for him without the weight of hesitation dragging behind every step. For the first time in a while, the path ahead felt clear.
The spirit didn't rise from his own seat. He simply lifted a hand and gave a slow, easy wave. "Let me send you off."
He opened the way out of the domain, and Eric felt his consciousness begin to lift, drawn upward and away.
Eric looked back down at the place one last time as he rose. The hut. The fire pit. The lake, still and quiet below him.
Then his gaze caught on something by the water's edge, and everything in him went still.
A figure stood there. Its reflection sat perfectly on the lake's calm surface, sharp and undistorted. Pink bodysuit. Pink hair. Eric's own face looking back up at him from the water.
It was him. Somehow, impossibly, it was him.
The figure turned its head and looked up, watching Eric ascend, a slow smile spreading across its face. Its eyes were both rose pink, both of them, none of the heterochromia Eric had lived with his entire life.
What was that? That's not him. That's not the one I just spoke to. Was that-
Eric's thoughts scattered, one crashing into the next before any of them could finish. If the white-haired spirit at the hut wasn't his true spirit, then what had he just poured his question into? What had just answered him? And if that thing by the lake, pink-eyed, pink-haired, smiling up at him like it had been waiting far longer than he knew, was the real one, then what exactly had he been talking to this entire time?
He wanted to stay. He wanted to drop straight back down and demand an answer, wanted to understand what he had just seen before it slipped away from him entirely.
He caught himself before the thought could fully form.
Don't. Not here. Not like this.
Chasing it further, unraveling something this size while still inside his own domain, was exactly the kind of thing that could tip him past his limits. He forced the thought down, buried it before it could take root, even as the image stayed burned behind his eyes.
Before he could decide anything else, he was ejected.
Eric opened his eyes back in reality, still seated on the stool by the window of his bedroom in the apartment. The city sat quiet outside, and the moon hung pale above the rooftops.
His hands were trembling faintly, and the fear from what he'd seen hadn't fully left him. But he made himself breathe, slow and even, and let his gaze settle on the moon outside. Between his own hardened will and the quiet, grounding familiarity of Max sleeping just down the hall, the panic receded slowly, but it receded all the same.
He felt it before he understood it, the control over his Aura creeping upward, steady and sure, climbing until it settled at sixty-five percent. After years of straining against that same ceiling, it had finally moved.
For a moment, Eric just sat there, staring at nothing, letting the number settle into him.
His throat tightened without warning. He hadn't expected that, hadn't braced for it, and it caught him somewhere low in his chest before he could stop it. Years of grinding against a wall that refused to budge, all of it pressing up at once now that the wall had finally given way. His eyes stung, and for a few seconds he simply let them, blinking hard against the ceiling instead of down at his hands, breathing slowly until the feeling passed.
This was only one step. He knew that. There would be countless more waiting after it, each one just as hard-won. But he let himself have this one moment anyway, letting the quiet satisfaction of it settle over him before he had to move on to whatever came next.
Behind him, on the bed, Ruby stirred. Her eyes opened slowly, still heavy with sleep, and found him sitting on the stool beside her.
"Eric," she murmured, voice thick and tired.
He turned to look at her.
Nothing came.
No confusion. No hesitation. No doubt, no ache, no quiet unraveling of something he used to feel. There wasn't even the shape of a loss where something should have been. It was simply gone, cleanly, completely, as if it had never been there at all.
Somewhere underneath that emptiness, something in him settled. A weight he'd been carrying without fully realizing it lifted away, and he felt lighter for it in a way that should have troubled him more than it did.
He smiled at her anyway, a small and gentle one; he felt a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders.
He shifted onto the bed beside her, pulling the blanket over them both, and leaned in close enough that his lips brushed her ear. The words came out soft, familiar, exactly the way they always had.
"I love you."
Ruby shivered against him, still half in sleep, her body responding to the warmth of it even as the words themselves meant nothing at all coming from him now. She had no way of knowing that. She simply pulled closer, comforted, unaware that the man beside her had just said the truest lie of his life without feeling a single thing say it.
Eric closed his eyes beside her, and somewhere far beneath the calm, something quietly finished dying.